Our Collaborating Centers

Leonard Davis Institute

With a gift from Leonard and Sophie Davis, the University of Pennsylvania established the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) in 1967, two years after Congress enacted Medicare. It was created to fill fundamental gaps in the evidence base that could inform policies critical to the financing and management of the nation’s increasingly costly and complex health care system. Today, LDI is considered one of the world’s leading university-based programs of its kind. LDI and its Senior Fellows are among the pioneers in interdisciplinary health services research that has helped guide health policies at all levels of government and the private sector. More than 200 LDI Senior Fellows work to improve the health of the public through studies on the medical, economic, and social issues that influence how health care is organized, financed, managed, and delivered.

As Penn’s center for research, policy analysis, and education in health systems, LDI is one of the first university programs to successfully cultivate collaborative scholarship among typically disparate disciplines. LDI is a cooperative venture among Penn’s health professions, business, and communications schools (Medicine, Wharton, Nursing, Dental Medicine, Law School, and Annenberg School for Communication) and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, with linkages to other Penn schools, including Arts & Sciences, Education, Social Policy and Practice, and Veterinary Medicine.

CHIBE

The Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics at the Leonard Davis Institute (CHIBE) of the University of Pennsylvania provides an academic home for behavioral economic research that makes significant contributions to reducing the disease burden from major U.S. public health problems, such as tobacco dependence, obesity, and medication non-adherence.

Founded in 2008 in collaboration with faculty from the Center for Behavioral Decision Research at Carnegie Mellon University, CHIBE is one of two NIH-funded Centers in Behavioral Economics and Health in the United States. CHIBE shares faculty and leadership with the Penn CMU Roybal P30 Center on Behavioral Economics and Health, which was established by Drs. Kevin Volpp and George Loewenstein to support the translation of behavioral economic principles into research that improves the health of aging and older populations.

CPHI

The Center for Public Health Initiatives (CPHI) of the University of Pennsylvania is a university-wide center which was founded in 2007 by the Provost’s Office. CPHI promotes interdisciplinary research, education and practice in public health and acts as the organizational home and academic base for Penn’s multi-disciplinary, inter-school Master in Public Health (MPH) degree program, one of the first multi-school accredited MPH Programs in the U.S.

Founded in 2007, the CPHI mission is to improve health and quality of life by expanding and strengthening public health education, research and practice, fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration, and promoting meaningful community/academic partnerships.

The Founding Director of the CPHI was Dr. Marjorie Bowman, until 2012 when she left UPenn to become the Dean of the Boonshoft School of Medicine at Wright State University. The current Executive Director of CPHI is Dr. Jennifer Pinto-Martin.

CEAR Core

The Community Engagement and Research Core (CEAR) is part of The Clinical and Translational Science Award, a program which is operated jointly by the University of Pennsylvania, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), the Wistar Institute, and the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. The academic home for the CTSA is the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics (ITMAT) at the University of Pennsylvania. The CTSA is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It was first funded for 5 years in 2006 and successfully renewed for another five years in 2011.

The purpose of the CEAR Core is to facilitate community-based research and community engagement, especially community-based participatory research, and enhance the translation of research and technological developments to key public health and community stakeholders.

CHBR

Established in 2009, the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Health Behavior Research is an institution-wide collaborative effort, dedicated to conducting health behavior research, fostering advances in measurement of health behaviors, advancing the use of health behavior theory, and promoting collaboration among faculty, fellows and students. Through theory-based research and a broad focus on measurement of health behavior, the CHBR contributes to both fundamental and applied research to help individuals, populations and clinicians improve health behaviors and outcomes. The CHBR is a Type I center that is housed within the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (CCEB) at the Perelman School of Medicine.

Penn Injury Science Center

The Penn Injury Science Center brings together university, community, and government partners around injury and violence intervention programs with the highest potential for impact. We promote and perform the highest quality research, training and translation of scientific discoveries into practice and policy, in order to reduce injuries, violence and their impact in our region, in the US, and in numerous other locations around the world.

The Center is networked with a diverse group of academic and community-based scientists, students, fellows, and staff representing six Penn Schools, twelve other Penn Institutes and Centers, two Level 1 Trauma Centers, and three Research Laboratories, which share a strong interest in the science of preventing violence and injuries.

Penn Memory Center

The Penn Memory Center is a single, unified Penn Medicine source for those age 65 and older seeking evaluation, diagnosis, treatment, information, and research opportunities related to symptoms of progressive memory loss, and accompanying changes in thinking, communication and personality.

The Penn Memory Center is one of only 30 National Institute on Aging-designated Alzheimer’s Disease Centers (ADC) and the only site in our tri-state region. ADC designation is earned by leading universities and medical institutions offering state-of-the-science diagnosis, treatment, research, and more for individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and other age-related progressive memory disorders.

Quality of life has to do with how the patient feels about their life. It’s an assessment from the patient's own perspective; that’s what makes a quality of life indicator unique and different from other measures of how well the patient is functioning. How the patient feels they’re doing in terms of their social real, their general health from a medical perspective, and their general sense of wellbeing.

This website is supported by Cooperative Agreement Number 1 U48DP005053 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the UPenn Prevention Research Center and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.